Due to the volume of the data, we first had to reduce our working set. First, we decided to see data about North and Central America, however, we still found that, due to performance issues, it was really hard to use our tool in an interactive way (i.e., we had to wait too much for each operation like zooming, panning, etc.). After this, we further reduced the working data set to only Mexico and Central America and we started to see interesting patterns.

Immediately we noticed the lack of data in the Nicaragua and Honduras region, however, we saw a dense cloud of birds in Costa Rica. A quick Internet search revealed a huge offer of "Bird Sighting" travels to Costa Rica. We also noticed some "empty spots" in the data for Mexico. Those empty spots matched, not surprisingly with highly populated areas (Mexico City in the south and Monterrey in the northeast).

Looking deeper into population information about Costa Rica, we noticed that for such a small area, it has nevertheless above 4 million inhabitants, so the effect on population density would not explain neither the empty spots in Mexico or the big number of birds we noticed in Costa Rica (Mexico has a population density of 55 inhabitants per square kilometer, while Costa Rica has 85)\cite{wikipedia:costarica, wikipedia:mexico}.

Intrigued by this fact, we kept looking on the Internet and we found an interesting article describing policies enforced in Costa Rica for reforestation, forest management and forest protection \cite{costarica:foreststrategy}. The article describes the evolution of Costa Rica's forests since 1950, emphasizing that the World Bank's 1993 Forest Sector Re-view of Costa Rica probably have had the greatest impact. Such enforcement of policies have, we deducted, influenced on animal population. From our testing data set, which contains only bird data, we can see the effects of such policies.

We are almost certain that, given the time and the data, we could see this pattern again in Costa Rica. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, the Time Slider component was not available at the time of writing this report. It would have been definitively interesting to see the effects of this set of policies in Costa Rica year by year. Nevertheless, with the functionality currently implemented, we could easily detect Costa Rica as an outlier.
